Conventionally, security of safes of financial institutions, companies' confidential storage locations, banks and various shops such as convenience stores where ATMs (automated teller machines) are set up is maintained using moving images and still images of a object to be monitored picked up by surveillance cameras set up therein.
A technology disclosed in Patent Literature 1 is known as such an image pickup system using a stationary camera. Patent Literature 1 discloses a technology as shown in FIG. 1 that displays a camera icon indicating the position, orientation and image-pickup range of a camera on a planar map showing various stores and displays, when a user selects the camera icon displayed, images picked up by the selected camera along with the planar map.
Such a crime prevention system using a stationary camera may not be able to sufficiently pick up images of countenance, height, clothes or the like of the object to be monitored depending on the image-pickup direction of the camera or sufficiently collect information on the object to be monitored. Moreover, such a system cannot be used in an open space such as outdoors where it is difficult to set up the stationary camera. For this reason, in recent years, as disclosed in Patent Literature 2, guards, company employees, salesclerks at shops or the like may be provided with wearable cameras attached to their bodies (head, chest pockets or the like) to guard security locations and keep watch on suspicious individuals using images picked up during guarding.
Furthermore, a technology disclosed in Patent Literature 3 is a technology that manages, when monitoring a wide area using a plurality of moving cameras linked with one another, the positions and photographing directions of the moving cameras, thereby extracts a plurality of moving cameras photographing the same object and displays the object photographed by the plurality of moving cameras. This allows position information acquired by a camera in the best photographing situation to be shared among the cameras and thereby facilitates keeping track of the object.
Furthermore, the technology disclosed in Patent Literature 4 is a technology that selects, when a user specifies a point to be viewed, a camera which can photograph the point ahead of any camera else. This allows an administrator to view any desired object or location to be viewed using a simple method even when a plurality of cameras exist.